Hannah Arendt: Thinking, Judging, Freedom

by Gisela Kaplan

The years since Hannah Arendt's death have seen an intensification of interest in her, both as a thinker and as a figure of her times. This interdisciplinary collection of essays offers a series of engagements with Arendt - at "eye level" in a series of debates, conversations and arguments across the full range of her major intellectual interests. It seeks to outline and investigate the unity of Arendt's life and work.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Charlene Mathe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't finished the book--probably will never have time to finish it, because I am not sufficiently familiar with the terms and concepts these scholars use. It makes it difficult for me to follow their points. I picked up the book because I am intrigued by the subject: "Thinking, Judging, Freedom."
I believe intuitively that our Freedoms require citizens who think and judge. In our day, thinking requires wrestling with information overload, misinformation, bias and doublespeak. Who has time for it? What is worse, there is a taboo against "judging." To make a judgment on a matter is to automatically lose credibility in the eyes of the mainstream, as indeed one scholar observes on p.50: "To offer a moral judgment is anathema to most people. The more highly educated people are, the more reluctant they often are to make moral judgments."
In chapter 4, which I read, Michael W. Jackson, Professor of political theory at the University of Sydney, analyzes Hannah Arendt's commentary on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Arendt concluded that Eichmann was Exhibit A of "banal evil" -- evil perpetrated without thinking, and without moral judgment. This is in contrast to her earlier analysis of citizen Nazi's as radically evil; or the view of citizen Nazi's as cogs in a bureaucracy or an authoritarian culture--"just following orders." "For Arendt, evil results less from premeditation than from 'thoughtlessness'('Arendt, 1978, I:5)." (p48) "Her point is that Eichmann could not and did not think at all. In this, he represents a general phenomenon in our century." (p.48)
Other chapters that I will give a try eventually are "To judge in freedom: Hannah Arendt on the relation of thinking and morality," "The chosen people: the historical formation of identity," "Hannah Arendt and the historian: Nazism and the New Order," "The pariah and the citizen: on Arendt's political theory," and "Hannah Arendt and the classical republican tradition."